Oh, yes … Walter Cronkite DID say that the Soviets didn’t lose the Race to the Moon because “they had never been in it.”

That’s Cronkite in rye retrospect, 30 years on, opining his summation w/t knowledge base of 20/20 hindsight, the N-1 mishaps, etc. Review realtime transcripts/broadcasts from the period and he very much reported the Soviets and Americans were racing to the moon and mentioned it often in scripted pieces and ‘spacial segments.’

Most of those ‘anchors’ of tha era, as you most likely know, were prone to errors in their live space reporting. Cronkite mispoke more often than most space enthusiasts like to recall during his off-the-cuff-comments in unscripted moments of ‘live space coverage’ – usually out of excited exuberance at the expense of accuarcy- as he was quite familiar w/t hardware and flight ops which makes the errors all the more charming in retrospect. Among some personal favorites are his expectant chatter as a high contrast, first color television image he believe to be a full Earth swam into view and his strained efforts to identify land masses for a few minutes in what was actually a straight on spherical view of 10’s disgarded S-IVB, post TLI– Cernan had not yet swung the camera over to the Earth. Another was his perplexed on-air questioning of a b/w image of fuming, steaming rechtangles– he simply could not recognize it– a producer told him the image was one of the b/w cameras from the pad tower staring down at the launch pad not long after after a Saturn V had passed the camera, and the deck was steaming and smoking in the wake of the Saturn’s flaming tail.

“As for 12. WAsnt it CBS who resorted to actors in space suits trying to redo after the 12 camera died…anyway that was the last mission.”

Except it wasn’t. Wrong again.

The CBS tandem sims were SOP in their Apollo coverage w/mock-ups for the LM and CSM in use from the contractors. Leo Krupp represented the contractor and went through the CSM ops on camera, w/ Grauman personnel helping out w/LM ops. CBS used their sims for sure through 15, complete w/a rover on set. But as early as Gemini 9, Cronkite had some M/D engineers in Gemini garb on camera going through the motions as relayed by Cernan and Stafford’s audio, including simulating the spacewalk above a rotating Earth, suspended from cables around a Gemini mock-up. Perhaps the most amusing use of sims was NBC’s use of Gemini scale models available to the general public afixed to small electric train cars with the tracks layed out on the studio floor to demonstrate rendevous. CBS used a very early computer display to demonstrate same.

“Had the people been watching they would have kept it on 24/7.”

Except they wouldn’t. First, it was not televised 24/7- unless you wanted to air color bars… hence the need/use of the sims and, of course ‘television’ from the lunar EVAs in ’69 was only a few hours total of 11 and 12- (12’s was no more than half an hour of EVA ops on camera- color BTW) w/a 14 month gap between 12’s truncated telecast and 14’s EVA broadcast. The public moved on from mid-1969 to early 1971. Overlay events- Nam, Kent State, etc… The Apollo broadcasts on CBS were chiefly sponsored by the Bell System, w/some spot buys by General Foods (Tang commercials) and during 11, Kellogg’s and several others who wanted to be associated w/11. NBC’s Apollo coverage throughout the program was sponsored by Gulf Oil. The spot buys by advertisers on the nets were made for entertainment programming, not news/special events coverage, and those advertisers paid for the time accordingly to reach that audience, an audience which cost more to reach.

“The PRC deserve praise and kudos for their accomplishments thus far. The difference is, they’re marching to their own drummer. And Luna is a goal- if only to hallmark this century as theirs.”

Agreed (see Leroy Chiao’s comments below).

Rand Simberg wrote:

“I predict that an American company will be back to the moon before the Chinese government.”

I very much hope that you are right.

Robert G. Oler wrote:

“… the USSR was never really close to a crewed expedition to the Moon. And it wasnt just the N1 but the production issues with the N1 were symptomatic of that problem.”

The USSR was certainly close to a manned voyage around the Moon utilizing the Zond spacecraft and Proton rocket. In fact, Soviet censors slipped up at the time of the Apollo-Soyuz mission and released a photo of Valeri Kubasov training inside a Zond simulator. But I assume you’re referring to a lunar landing mission.

The Soviet LK lunar lander was tested in Earth orbit three times, and all three missions (Cosmos 379, 398 and 434) were successful. The LOK lunar command ship was based on Soyuz. The Krechet lunar EVA spacesuit had already been fabricated and tested. And crews were in training for lunar missions.

The major stumbling block, as Boris Chertok described in Volume IV (“The Moon Race”) of his monumental memoir, “Rockets and People”, was the N1 carrier rocket with its plumber’s nightmare of thirty (30) 1st-stage engines. It’s as if NASA had the Apollo Command/Service Module, the Lunar Module, the spacesuits and all the rest ready to fly … but the Saturn V kept blowing up.

The point is, the Soviets were very serious about landing cosmonauts on the lunar surface, even after they had lost the “race” to the Moon.

Oh, yes … Walter Cronkite DID say that the Soviets didn’t lose the Race to the Moon because “they had never been in it.” He made that remark during the space segment of a retrospective program that covered his broadcast career. Needless to say, he was wrong. Cronkite based his comment on Soviet statements of the time which claimed that their focus had been on robotic lunar explorers and Earth orbital space stations. Most journalists swallowed that Party line.

As for the Chinese … who says they are providing us with ALL of the details of their future plans? As with the ‘Sovietologists’ of a bygone era, it is sometimes necessary for China analysts to read between the lines of Chinese statements.

Once again, speaking with Miles O’Brien, Leroy Chiao made the following well-informed points:

“… they [the Chinese] have alluded to plans, to land astronauts on the moon. They’ve put up no concrete plans to do that, but I have to believe they’re aiming for the moon because the moon culturally is such an important thing to China and to all Asian countries. It’s hard to imagine that they’re not planning to do that. They’re planning unmanned missions there, Rover missions, things like that, and of course they’re building their Long March 5 rocket, which is an advanced cryogenic rocket that they have. Their first large-scale liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen engines in the first core stage. They’re building their launch facility in Hainan Island. I understand that’s going to be where they’re going to move with all their human operations. So at 19 degrees latitude Hainan is an ideal place to launch to the moon.”

“Vividly recall, doring the Apollo march to the moon, watching the Brits taking five years to build a 20 story building across the street from our flat in London. And we chuckled. In that era, Americans would have put it up in less than a year. ”

Here is a video of a Chinese company building a 30-story hotel from the ground up – in 15 days!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjGhHl-W8Wg

Next question?

“Which, of course, is what Walter Cronkite once said about the Soviet Union.”

I don’t know why you would put so much stock in what a news reporter has to guess about what was happening within the borders of a closed country. Maybe if he had infiltrated the Soviet Union as a spy he would have had some sort of unique perspective, but otherwise it was a closed country and we had crude spy satellites through which to gather data.

Three things though:

1. Even with the firsts China has been accumulating, it still hasn’t attained the least sought after first – the first of their countrymen to die. Will they have the same stoic-ness that the Soviet Union and the U.S. have had? Likely, but likely too is that their space program will react to that loss of life.

2. The hardware the Chinese are using today is not the hardware they are going to the Moon in. So far they have been perfecting the usage of LEO hardware, and have not unveiled any of the space hardware needed to support a concerted effort on the Moon – which is what those that fear China are afraid of their doing.

3. As far as we know, China’s military is directing their space program. If their space program leaders are like their military leaders, then they are a bunch of old guys with lots of ribbons on their blouses. In that case, they haven’t had the benefit of the experience that comes with hard fought successes and failures, and they would be running their space program as they run any slow paced military program. Any one of our space entrepreneurs could run orbits around them given the same resources, and some are outpacing them today on far meager budgets.

Absent any REAL hardware or progress in space, it sure seems like they are taking their time getting to the Moon. I’d say at least 20 years given their current pace, in which time one or more of our commercial companies will have beat them there and will be ready to offer them Starbuck’s tea.

“American public interest fluxuated between the 40%-60% interest level, depending on timing and the way the polls were worded, but world interest remained high and is well docuimented– even in the USSR (saw it first hand post 14 in Moscow) — and 12′s ‘extended’ coverage stateside was abbreviated due to Beano burning out the TV camera– if you knew your history. In fact, in Britain, ‘extended coverage’ flourished w/t audio carried as frustrated BBC anchors literally moved plastic astronauts around on a simulated moonscape in tandem w/the audio. =eyeroll=”

LOL. After 11 public interest never really got about 50 and probably was nicely settled in the 30-40 percent. R. Landus has done a pretty good analysis of the polls.

One sure indication of the lack of American interest is that the “for profit” media dropped it quickly when they realized that the interest in the “people who made the profit” was not there. Had the people been watching they would have kept it on 24/7

As for 12. WAsnt it CBS who resorted to actors in space suits trying to redo after the 12 camera died…anyway that was the last mission. 13 cranked some coverage but then it was toast…one reason I was glad to have one of the first “TVRO earth stations” we watched the bird feed… still have the parametric amp. RGO

Robert G. Oler wrote:

“Second of course there is no evidence that the Chinese are going to the Moon.”

you replied “Which, of course, is what Walter Cronkite once said about the Soviet Union.”

that is not quite accurate…I would have to go looking for the quote exactly… And today we know a lot more about what the Red Chinese are doing then we knew in that era about what Ivan was.

The reality of course, and I suspect like the Chinese, the USSR was never really close to a crewed expedition to the Moon. And it wasnt just the N1 but the production issues with the N1 were symptomatic of that problem.

RGO